"What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse." Henry Miller's magnificent lady-magnet, Henry Valentine, comes in with a bullet at number 3, in FlavorWire.com's top 30 literary pulling lines of all time. I thought this was the sexiest line ever; I said it to my friend. She was nonplussed. I moved on to Pablo Neruda, "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." "No, no," she said, "that sounds as if you're going to make my skirt blow up and mess up my hair". In the end I wooed her with sexy Byron (doesn't that sound like a Beyoncé chorus? Ooh Sexy Byron!), "A little she strove, and much repented, / And whispering, 'I will ne'er consent' – consented."

You see, everybody loves a list, and I can think of no better list: high-concept, but this is much more than 30 ways to get into somebody's pants. Some of these are so good they make you wish you could go back in time, or change sexuality, or get a catsuit, or do all those things. Joyce Carol Oates, you rock, lady. "Like they're pretending not to know who I am: I'm Legs Sadovsky I'm FOXFIRE I don't fuck around with guys." The simplicity of Kathy Acker has stayed with me. "If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything." There's not a dud among them, apart from this totally lame come-on from London Fields: "You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact – all that?" It's weird, because when I was a student, reading Martin Amis was pretty much the only literary way to get laid.